


Something

by plaidventurer



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bill Cipher is a Jerk, Brotherly Bonding, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grunkle Ford Has Issues, Grunkle Ford Needs A Hug, Grunkle Ford-centric, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mild Blood, Mild Gore, Older Pines Twins, Stan O' War, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-09-22 20:45:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9624611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plaidventurer/pseuds/plaidventurer
Summary: Ford sits, elbows on his desk, staring in deep absorption at the two postcards resting side by side in front of him. Both have his address scrawled on one side. Both have various nicks and folds from being slid throughout drawers or just in between Ford’s own nervous hands. The card by his left arm reads, in bold, hasty script, “PLEASE COME!” The one on the right simply says, “This is goodbye, Stan.”Stanford Pines has a choice. Neither option guarantees the survival of the world, but at least one might save his brother.





	1. Where Is My Mind?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter titles are taken from the cover of "Where Is My Mind" by Placebo.

Ford sits, elbows on his desk, staring in deep absorption at the two postcards resting side by side in front of him. Both have his address scrawled on one side. Both have various nicks and folds from being slid throughout drawers or just in between Ford’s own nervous hands. He’d bought a dozen or so of them when he first moved to Gravity Falls so that he could keep in touch with his mother. He hasn’t sent her one in weeks. These are the only two left, in fact, but it’s not like he’ll be needing any more in the future. The card by his left arm reads, in bold, hasty script, “PLEASE COME!” The one on the right simply says, “This is goodbye, Stan.”

Bill has shown him the universe where he chooses the card to his right. He studies it now, his eyes vacant and drooping from lack of sleep. He stares, and ponders, and remembers the shaking of other-Ford’s fingers as he mailed the card. It had been snowing and his trench coat hadn’t done anything for him in the cold, but he was experiencing a vague sensation of numbness all over that sort of drowned out everything else. Ford could feel it radiating from his counterpart as if they were pieces of a singular but broken unit, strewn far apart and yet still, achingly, sensing the same things.

The postcard was the first step— _is the first step_ —towards a better…a better… _something_.

Bill has shown him the universe where he chooses the water. It’s his _something_ , his grand decision, for all of the ages it takes him to fill his lungs with the black murk of Lake Gravity Falls. Luckily, Ford isn’t as afraid as Stanley used to be (or still is, he wouldn’t know) of heights, so the cliff really isn’t a problem. It’s the fall and the last minute _I can fight him, I can beat him (_ and, of course, the enraged and panicked screech of _WHAT ARE YOU DOING, SIXER)_ that really sends his heart thudding in terror. _But, this is for the best-_

The world is cold and fuzzy, and Ford chokes on air that tastes of mud while he watches from somewhere above when other-him crash lands. He sinks to the ground and lets the damp wind whip raindrops into his eyes as he stares down the edge of the cliff’s side. His glasses have slipped off his nose already into the great abyss, but even with them on he knows he would not see life cresting the surface of that lake.

 

_This is what you want, Sixer?_

 

Ford doesn’t trust himself enough to answer.

 

The wet grass bleeds through the knees of his pants like spilt liquor. All he can do is feel unnervingly anesthetized and sway with the breeze as it clips his ears. This is pure, unadulterated manipulation on Bill’s part, of course. Ford plays along, though, because he’s tired and worn out and Bill’s pretending to give him a rest from the more _physical_ torture of his reality with his muse. He doesn’t know how he’s managed to banish Bill’s control in this other life, or—God forbid—just trap him entirely in his head. All this...it was his original plan, of course, but he never got past the bit about actually incapacitating Bill long enough for him to get where he needed to be. What did his counterpart do with the journals? He must have hidden them somehow without completely destroying them—after all, they were the only things to show that he had done something worthwhile with his life. Somehow, this Ford was able to gain the upper hand enough to do what had to be done. _What must be done. It’s for the safety of your universe. You’re running out of time—_

Bill has told him that he really doesn’t like that universe much, in the aftermath of what happens. That neither would other-Ford, if he was still alive in it. Ford’s not really sure that’s true, but his muse wants him to be fully aware of the possibility, of course.

Bill shows him. And shows him. And shows him.

He shows him Stanley, driving white-knuckled up to Gravity Falls, Oregon in a beat-up car with the postcard balancing shakily atop his knees. There’s an expression of determination on his face, and of fear, too. He doesn’t know what to expect; Ford can tell from where Bill has left him in the dirty back seat. Stan’s thinking hard, searching for all the possibilities of what the damned thing _means_ as he speeds down another back road and around another snow-covered turn. The car skids on ice but Stanley doesn’t seem to be paying much attention. “Mind your speed, Stan. Both Pines twins don’t have to go just yet,” Ford wants to say, but Stan wouldn’t stop even if he could hear him. He’s a half hour, max, from his destination, but Ford’s already been under for over two hours and not even a demon could help him hold his breath for that long.

Stan gets to the house, and the door’s unlocked. He calls out for Ford, for anybody, and the not-from-this-universe Ford cries out for him in return. Stan can’t hear him, though; only the thudding of his heart because he’d be damned if something isn’t wrong with this situation. The house is frigidly cold, and Stan clutches the postcard tightly to his chest as he roams throughout its barren halls. Everything possesses an eerie quality, as though it were a tomb (Ford almost laughs at the thought). Stan notes this, and he shakily looks down at the postcard in his hand. The lines in his face are as prevalent as if he were a man twice his age. Ford briefly wonders as he peers at him if it’s from the ominous farewell he received or something more.

In his search for his brother, Stan doesn’t find the basement door, which Ford almost feels relief over. That is, until Stan finds the letter.

Ford has always hated the sound of his brother crying simply because, as a child, Stan had been his protector and his best friend. No one picked on Stanford Pines without receiving some kind of beating from his twin, but Ford was the weaker of the two of them so sometimes it wasn’t as easy for him to defend his brother’s honor. If someone hurt Stan, they were also hurting Ford. Anger was almost a better alternative to the ache of sadness that pulled tears from their young eyes. Anger fueled them both. It let them rage, white-hot and furious, without the fear of something bigger in the moment.

 _Something_.

Ford has always hated the sound of his brother crying, but this is somehow worse. This is ugly because it is angry and sad and purely both, but at the same time neither at all. Stan has dropped the postcard and stepped on it, and it’s covered in mud and snow and Ford knows he’ll probably regret that later. For now, though, he’s on his knees, crying out in unrestrained, animalistic sobs. Every part of him hurts and every word he breathes is hurting Ford, but not the Ford that is out in the water somewhere, drifting. That Ford is beyond feeling anything.

Bill likes to show him what happens next. What happens hours after he fishes out the... _Ford’s_...body. Stan’s eyes are red and puffy, and he crumples the note and postcard together in his left fist as he staggers into Ford’s bedroom, days after the tear stains melt away all traces of words on the papers.

 

 _He has nothing left, Stanford Pines. Nobody but you. Look at what you’ve done to him, Fordsy,_ Bill whispers from inside a wall. Ford’s skin crawls as he feels the demon’s gaze appear in every surface. Every knot of wood contains Bill’s ever-pulsing, ever- sharpening eye.

“Stan,” Ford croaks, reaching out for his brother as Stan rounds the corner. He follows blindly like a lost puppy, shivering. _Like the lost child you used to be, looking for a sanctuary in Stanley._ Ford flinches and ducks his head away under his arms every time Stan finds what he’s looking for in the bedside drawer, but Bill still makes him _listen_.

Most of the time, he wakes up from the visions and immediately lunges for the edge of his desk, occasionally shattering a half-full glass as he knocks it over in his blind scrabble for the wastebasket. His sweat-slicked hands grip the edge of the desk tightly. The stars in his vision threaten to pull him down anyways, though, and his grasp is failing miserably due to the recurring tremors. The smells of vomit and alcohol sting the inside of his throat and nose, but the acrid scent of a smoking gun is what really makes his eyes water.

 

The last time he saw this universe ( _the final time, you’re going to choose now_ ), Ford had slammed his shoulder into the side of the desk as he went down. Cursing, he’d pulled himself up on weak legs after heaving for what seemed like millennia and absently rubbed his throbbing arm. In his haste, he’d knocked over his usual glass of whatever the hell he had stored upstairs, as well as a bottle of ink. It seeped through his papers in a flash, but he couldn't feel anything. It licked the edge of an old photograph leaned up against one of his books. He just stared at it. He stared at the blood caked under his fingernails, the ink running across his desk, and pondered the multiverse with rattling breaths.

Now, Ford stares and stares and _stares_ until his eyes dry out behind his glasses, and yet, he still looks on at the two cards. Bill has shown him that other universe, of course. The postcard on the left. It’s really just a string of flashing frames, tied together by the whirring of the portal and the screams of someone in the distance who could possibly be him. The universe is gray and bleak and endless, stretching through voids that seem to consume and reassemble him all at once.

Two Fords scream as a bluish beast of some kind tears one of them apart, leaving behind a bloody mess of flesh and brain that barely exists anymore. Bill whisks the physically unharmed Ford off into another time, another place, where he watches Stanley tending to his mangled shoulder. His brother is sad, his brother is crying, his brother thinks Ford is arrogant and idiotic and _his responsibility to save because he loves him._ Pus and blood ooze out from the mysterious wound, and all Ford can do is whimper over and over again to a man that cannot hear him. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—_

In either universe, he would be sorry. He’d just feel the emotion more grotesquely in one rather than the other.

The skin on his wrists and around his neck bubbles and blisters with phantom shadows of future burns. Ford’s chest feels stretched and strained, and he can vaguely recognize the pulse of electricity thrum throughout his body in one of the visions where he is bound by molten chains. The shock spreads, blue and crackling, until his hands shake violently and he just wants it to be _over_. He watches his hair go gray as the wounds come and go. He doesn’t know how this other-Ford, the one who somehow lives past thirty, manages in his desolate nightmare world. Worlds. It’s hard to tell what is what with the way Bill’s shuffling times and planets like a deck of cards. Sometimes he glimpses alien dimensions through the haze, and they’d normally fascinate him if he wasn't trying so hard not to puke his guts out.

 

Ford comes back to himself when he feels the talons of some exotic indigo bird tear through his shoulder, and suddenly he’s matching his brother in placement of scars. _Like real twins._ He vaguely registers biting clean through the inside of his cheeks and doubling over, slamming into the ground. White spasms of light swim across his vision like ships against a midnight sea. Like the ones at Glass Shard Beach. Blood dribbles from his mouth as he sucks in the metallic taste of the air, and there is a voice ringing in his head, whispering, _Six-fingers, are you ready? Are you ready?_

Pain is his _something_ in these dimensions. While diving through these visions, all Ford can feel is gut-wrenching emotions and aches he never fathomed he would experience. Some degree of suicidal sentiment has been retained in this life, he notes, and he wonders if that's just a part of him now that will remain forever. He breaks through the void, but there is no point. He’s too small and insignificant to change the outcome that has already been set in motion when his tiny tear in space and time creates a rift between worlds. It’s worth the lives of millions, and somehow, through some gray static that the observing Ford cannot squint past, he makes it back by the guidance of its light. Alive. Alive, but in pain, and with so much left behind. And when he returns to his own world, hardly whole by all definitions, it’s as though he has just plunged underneath the water anyways. Something is choking him and the smell of alcohol burns the back of his throat like acid.

In the universe to his left, as he sits at his desk with his chin in his hands, Ford brings about the end of the world. And, oh, how he’s sorry for that. But in the universe to his right, someone else does. Some other pair of twins, decades into the future. He isn’t there to stop them when they find the three journals somehow. When the sky splits and all hell breaks loose.

 

He sees himself alive, but drinking himself beyond repair in the aftermath of something that he cannot decipher through the mist.

 

He sees himself alive, but with a crushing desire to go back in time and choose a little more wisely. A little more selfishly.

 

He sees himself dead.

 

He doesn't know what his _something_ really is, or ever was.

 

_So, what’ll it be, Sixer? I know which one you’ll choose._

He wants to be defiant and choose the right. Pull free from Bill’s dominance, fling himself over the edge, burn his portal to the ground. Finish what he has started before it’s beyond his control. He wants to taste the mud in the water and feel the shattering of his mind, his conscience...his ability to let Bill take what he wants from Ford’s universe.

He can’t let him win.

But he can’t let Stan die and the world fall if there’s a chance he can stop both.

A world without Stanford Pines would absolutely be a better one, and he knows it. It gnaws at him desperately, and he wants it to be untrue, but the way Bill laughs at him confirms his every fear. He is nothing but a pawn. His muse is the blue beast, ripping him to shreds. Bill is the gunshot, the tears, the final leap. Bill is everything and everyone. He is the void, endlessly hungry and always unsatisfied.

And yet, a world without Stanley Pines, a world that would end anyways by the hands of someone else, would be nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

He stares at the postcards and he loathes them with all the anger he can manage so that it doesn’t slip away to sadness. He hates his brother (at least he wants to believe it), hates _himself_ for causing this. He’s still painfully bitter over what his brother has done to him, but for some reason seeing Stan dead is not as appealing as he once thought it could be. In his dreams he once longed for the day when he could make his brother pay for his actions and all his faults, but…the solemnity of what choice he has to make has cleared his judgement. It’s made everything disturbingly transparent, actually. What he hates most of all, though, is that he would, selfishly, still do almost anything to keep his twin alive. Which, his brother must be, since all of Bill’s possible futures revolve around Stanley Pines.

Ford blinks.

The undying quest for personal knowledge is Ford’s greatest weakness, and he knows it. If he even has a weakness ( _C’mon, Poindexter, everybody’s got faults. Even the better Pines twin_ ), it must be excessive curiosity, sometimes to the point of stupidity. His desire for information is a blessing and a curse, especially since the new voice in his head that sounds disturbingly like Stan is whispering suggestively: _You’ll never know. You’ll never know if Bill is just playing another trick. You’ll never understand if any of this is real if you taste that water._

He stands up, wincing at the tight dryness of his eyes, and wipes his sleeve against the blood dripping sluggishly from his nose. With shaking, six-fingered hands, Ford grips one postcard tightly.

                                                                    ***

Years later, after the scars have accumulated and the apocalypse has come and gone, Stan gives him back the second, unsent postcard.

“Y’know, I was in a bad place when you...when you disappeared,” Stan says gruffly, fiddling with the soda tab in his hand as he stares anywhere but Ford’s face. Ford sits in the chair across from him at the kitchen table in the cabin of the Stan O’ War II, working the frayed, yellowed card between all twelve of his fingers. There is a hollow feeling in his throat as he looks down at the worn letters. Indentations still remain from where Ford folded the paper anxiously on that one deciding night, and he wonders how much Stan understands about the message itself. There are remnants of bloody fingerprints in one corner. Ford is almost positive they are his.

_This is goodbye, Stan._

“It took me years to find this,” Stan continues, waving a hand absently over to where Ford is sitting. “I was sorting through your stuff—sorry about that, by the way—and I…well, I sort of came across it in a pile of papers.” He rubs the back of his neck.

Ford waits in silence as Stan flips the tab around a few more times. He absently recalls by the clicking of the can that they are almost out of this strange Canadian soda Stan likes so much; he’ll have to remember to pick some up next time they dock. It's funny how normal that sounds. How _normal_ their lives have become. He lets the card slip down onto the table and looks at his brother, feeling that familiar sensation of numbness for the first time in ages. “What did you think?”

Stan glances up at him. His eyes are hard, but not unkind. “I thought I was damn lucky to have gotten the one I did,” he says quietly, setting the can down and crossing his arms.

Ford nods slowly, and Stan watches him carefully. The intensity of his brother’s stare almost reminds Ford of the time--and he shudders at the thought--when Stan had first really become... _acquainted_ with Ford’s little habit. It had been a rough night; one of the first ones when they were out at sea, in fact. Ford had only had one drink. Or, maybe five. It was rather hard for him to recall after the fact, but his intention at least was only to sit for a while at the kitchen table and dull his nightmare-induced headache a bit. Of course, it only turned into a full-blown migraine the next morning because of it, but. That was beside the point. The point was that Stan found Ford at the deck railing at three in the morning, completely shitfaced and leaning a bit too close to the ocean. _I’m not going to kill myself, Stanley,_ Ford had slurred, brashly, and Stan’s face turned to stone. It was only slightly a lie, after all. Apparently it was enough of a lie to excuse a shouting match the next day and give Stan a reason to become obsessively watchful of him for weeks after. _Think about the kids, Stanford. Think about me. We can’t--I can’t watch you do this to yourself. Please, Ford--_ Let’s just say Ford hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol for quite a while after that episode. Those first weeks on the Stan O’ War II had been--well. They’d been rough for both of the elder Pines twins.

 

“At first I thought it could have been a clue for something, like you’d known about the fight before it happened, but that didn’t seem too possible. I mean, you’re smart as hell, but I don’t know if anyone is _that_ smart,” Stan adds with a tentatively playful tone. “I guess I was searching for answers. For _something_ from you. I didn’t know what it meant, or why you would've written it. Maybe you were telling me off before we could even meet up again, I dunno. But I remembered the state you were in when I first arrived, and—well. I made my assumptions.” He’s serious again as he speaks, and he looks older in that moment than Ford has ever seen before; it looks disturbingly similar to the sight he laid eyes on so many years ago in Bill’s visions. Stan’s face is drawn and exhausted, and all Ford can do for a moment is remember the smoke and the ringing noise left in his ears as he knelt in shattered glass with his hands over his mouth. _This could be real, IQ—_

Ford looks away, uncomfortably. “I—”

“Look,” Stan cuts him off with a wave of his hand. “I don’t think I’ll ever know fully what that filthy triangle did to you,” he begins with venom, and Ford winces in his seat, “but I do know that if you ever wanna talk about it, about any of it, that I’m right here for you. We’ve both been through a lot, bro, and we deserve some therapy.” Stan cracks a grin and Ford, despite his quickly blurring vision, can’t help but smile weakly back.

“I know, Stan. Thank you.”

Later that night, Ford climbs into his top bunk and listens in a trance to the sounds of Stan puttering about in the kitchen and the ocean smacking against the side of their boat. His hands are a bit clammy as Stan climbs into bed below him. Stan is still just as afraid of heights as he was when they were young, Ford realized soon after reuniting with him. He was glad to take the top bunk as his own after Stan had firmly established that they would be rooming together in their ocean vessel. Just like old times. Maybe it was because of Stan’s occasional memory lapses that left him confused and gasping in the mornings. Maybe it was Ford’s nightmares. Perhaps it was the ones that left him dripping with sweat and dying for a bottle or two of something strong enough to cure him. Even though, of course, nothing of that nature could ever do more than make his time bomb tick a little faster. On those nights, it was probably beneficial to his health that any thrashing from the top bunk woke Stanley almost immediately.

 

Ford stares up at the wooden ceiling and counts the beats between the crashing waves, realizing that this is the first night since they first boarded their boat that the noise has bothered him. He knows without a doubt the sudden sensation has been brought around again and riled up by the discussion earlier. It settles into his stomach like a growing ball of knotted twine, twisting and turning with a queasy feeling. He tells himself to _calm down, it’s not even freshwater, Stanford. It doesn’t smell or taste at all the same. Remember?_ Somehow that doesn’t really make him feel too much better.

“He showed me a set of different possible universes when I was trying to decide which postcard to send,” Ford begins quietly, when he fears the words will finally overtake him— _just like water, Sixer_ —and he hears the rustle of sheets below him stop.

“Bi--”

“Yes,” Ford interrupts sharply, then sighs. “Sorry.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Stan says softly, as if he’s dealing with something sensitive. And, it really is sensitive. This _something_ is what has guided Ford his whole life. The idea of _something_ , of a future so idealistic and pure but yet so general that it could play out a million different ways and have a million endings. It could be the water, black and dense and peaceful, or it could be this life with his brother. Cozy. Safe. Happy? Yes, maybe even that.

Ford takes a moment to breathe before he continues. “He showed me so many things that could happen, that _would_ happen if I chose either path. I thought he was giving me visions. But, then again, that was a time when I was still unsure of how powerful...Bill was.” The name turns over his tongue like sand, and it melts through his jaw to send a cold feeling down his spine. He hears Stanley shift beneath him, but he continues his trek forward.

“In reality, I assume now that he was showing me warped nightmares to make me set the right course of events into motion for him. Manipulation through dreams was his specialty. He did have access to my mindscape, after all, but I was too desperate for truth to really comprehend more than what was given to me. He betrayed me so much that I could not trust him with anything, but...it just felt too real. I was too consumed by exhaustion and fear to see clearly. After all, the nightmares were logical scenarios that I had…considered,” Ford says, and he coughs in embarrassment a moment after realizing that his voice has dropped to a pathetic whisper.

Stan doesn’t seem to notice. “What...what did he show you, if you don’t mind me asking?” He’s hesitant, Ford notes, and afraid. Ford almost laughs. Instead, he presses the heels of his palms to his eyes as if that could block out the red and blue and gray that seem to overtake his vision like the ocean.

“You dying,” Ford says, his words flat and bitter, and there is silence from the bunk below him. “And…my death, too, of course. But I presume you’ve already come to that conclusion based on the nature of my…” He trails off before he can say either ‘note’ or ‘final goodbye.’ Neither sounds especially reassuring.“Well, you know,” he mutters, waving a hand that Stan probably can't see. _Aww, wasn't that just painfully obvious, IQ—_ “In one future, I went through the portal. Everything played out relatively correctly, now that I look back on it. Although there are some parts…” He frowns momentarily, fingers ghosting over a place on his right shoulder, before shaking his head. “In the other universe, well. The irreversible occurred. For both of us.” He stops there, and lets the heavy silence compress him down against his bunk like a leaden weight.

The quiet stretches on, and just as Ford is opening his mouth to say something else in trepidation, there comes a gruff, “Get down here, Poindexter,” from his brother’s bed.

Ford climbs down the ladder like he’s seven years old again after dealing with a nightmare, but his joints creak a little more than they used to and this time he’s really faced the monsters in his dreams. He unintentionally averts his gaze from his twin’s eyes when he reaches the bottom, although he doesn’t need to because Stanley is pulling him aggressively into a tight hug (that is still mindful of bruised ribs retained from a recent kraken incident, of course) before he can even take in a breath. Ford lets out a small “oof” of surprise, but he lets his brother shake against him, clutching to his shirt. After a moment, he relaxes and inhales deeply. Stan smells of saltwater and coffee and that weird soap he insisted on “buying” at their last stop in Iceland, but it’s a comforting scent. A scent that overpowers the smoke and blood and alcohol that keep resurfacing in his aching mind. This hug is a large improvement from the first one they’d shared in thirty years, the one that happened after Stan was wiped from his own mind and everything fell apart. Now the pieces have hesitantly been glued together with a handful or two of Mabel’s glitter thrown on top for good luck. Ford can barely believe it’s true at last, but something about it all feels just right. As though Bill cut out this final piece of the story from his nightmare-visions and it’s just been waiting in his triangular shadow for him to fall.

The Pines twins’ happy ending.

The _something_ Ford has been looking for.

“I missed you so, so much,” Stan is mumbling into the folds of his sweater, and Ford is glad he already took off his glasses because otherwise they would be wet and smudged.

“I missed you too,” he responds, and his voice cracks audibly as he sighs against the warm embrace of his brother.

“You sound just like Dipper. Emotional nerd,” Stanley says with a watery laugh, and Ford can’t help but chuckle right along with him as the tears keep falling. “Don’t you ever leave again, y’hear?”

It’s clear that there’s a double meaning to his statement and Ford winces a bit. Stan doesn't really need a confirmation, but Ford has made it so blatantly obvious how he feels ever since the day the apocalypse stopped that one more couldn’t hurt. Besides, he’d definitely kept his brother on edge enough lately to lend him one small sentiment.

“None of our goodbyes have been permanent so far, and I’d like to keep it that way. At least for a little while,” Ford says so softly under his breath that Stan almost misses it. It’s a confession, an optimistic one that Stan has been dreaming of since they were teenagers. He grins against his brother’s shoulder in honest relief and tugs him a little closer, shaking them both with warm laughter.

“My point exactly, Poindexter.”

The next morning, the air is crisp with salt and sunshine, and everything feels a little lighter aboard their boat despite the heavy secrets spilled the night before. Stan wakes up to Ford brewing a batch of coffee, and they exchange smiles as the Stan O’ War II rocks peacefully in the sea.

Everything Bill had done to them, ever lie he’d told, every promise he’d broken...it all led up to this. And, in the long run, Ford was sure he’d do it all again if he had to. Sure, there was a lot that he would change about the loss of relationship between him and Stan, but he would not—not even for a second—alter the decision that he made as he sat considering the two postcards. He had been arrogant and blinded by his own sense of pride when he'd fallen for Bill’s trickery, and is was the first sensible decision he'd made in weeks to send for Stanley’s help. Even if it didn't go exactly as planned and he did have to face the terrors of the void. It was a matter of cleaning up the mess he’d made by summoning a demon, but only one option was the most effective. In one world, there were two children who brought the apocalypse upon the universe and didn’t have the means to reverse the process. In the other, in _this_ world, those twins saved the lives of everyone in Gravity Falls. _Stan_ saved everyone in Gravity Falls.

 

Stan saved Ford, and he continues to do so a little bit every day. Ford’s mind is more peaceful on that quaint little ship than it’s been in thirty years across multiple dimensions, all thanks to his brother.

His _something_ is worth it, after all.


	2. Way Out in the Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Water and choices didn't always just haunt Ford.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stan's POV! Enjoy.

Stan can either throw it in the wastebasket of his hotel room or get in his car and drag his ass to Oregon to help a man-- _your own brother_ \--who hasn’t contacted him in ten whole years.

It’s tempting. _Really_ fucking tempting. The postcard in his hand looks cheap, and it’s creased in about twenty different places. There’s a weird stain on the back and what look like ink splatters across the top. It would fit in perfectly with the rest of the trash in his room. Including himself.

 

“PLEASE COME!”

 

Those words don’t change anything.

 

Do they?

 

It would be so easy to just throw the damn thing away and be petty about it. After ten years, a whole _decade_ , Ford finally wants to get in touch. Why should he listen? Ford has probably gone to college and is living the dream, way out there in Oregon. He hasn’t shown that he’s needed or wanted Stanley at any point since _that night_. The one where it all went to shit.

Stan sighs and drops the postcard on the single bed of his dirty motel room. He heads to the bathroom and stands there for a moment, just gripping the edge of the sink like it could ground him or help him decipher this or _something_. All his efforts really do is crack some of the shoddy wood paneling that’s mostly peeling off of the sides already. He sighs again, gingerly releasing the sink and running a hand through his hair. There has been a fog in his brain for a while, and it has thickened to a dense soup ever since he first saw the postcard. He rubs his face on his mostly clean (probably?) shirt and stands in the doorway, staring in conflict at the plea he’s received.

Is it a plea, though, or more like a too-late request when Ford has no one else to turn to? Stan assumes he’ll never really know unless he actually heads up to where his brother is living now, but...is that something he can’t live without? He’s let lots of things slide, so why not one more? Well. He has tried forgetting, and it’s never really worked completely. Maybe ignorance will keep him from needing to forget this time. Maybe. He could totally ignore his brother’s attempt to contact him, but for some reason that power feels almost meaningless in his hands. It mocks him, almost. Well. Everything does, nowadays.

It’s three in the morning the next time he blinks, and Stan is lying on the rumpled sheets of the motel bed, clutching the postcard between tense fingers. He’s been staring at it for...God, hours, it seems. Ever since it was dropped through the slot in the door he’s practically never taken his eyes off it. And yet, he still has no idea what to do. What if he goes out there and Ford’s changed? What if he really does want Stanley back? That would be a miracle, if he’s being honest, and that’s not something he holds himself to very often.

The other potential meaning of the request, however, is the obvious. It could be some sick trick, for whatever reason, or a last-minute attempt to get Stan to come chasing after him again. Like a loyal dog. Maybe Stan’s just grown naturally suspicious from years of con after con, but still. Why would Ford want him back after all that transpired back in Glass Shard Beach? Stan ruined his twin’s life and his family’s future. _Right_ . In the adrenaline rush of the moment when his father kicked him to the curb for good, Stan knew--or thought he knew--solidly in his heart that he didn’t need anyone. He _was_ going to make millions and show that stuck-up, egotistic brother of his that Stanley Pines was an individual. Stanley Pines was going to live his life proudly without his twin, and he was going to do just fine, thank you very much.

_Yeah, as if that lasted._

The aftermath of that fight kept him reeling for weeks, for _months_ , even. For a decade he’s been staggering through life, faltering at every mishap and nearly sliding downwards with every silent phone call or almost-written letter. The only rest he gets is in the backseat of his car or the dingy bed of some forsaken motel in the middle of nowhere, far away from the demons he’s been running from. He has never really completely fallen into that pit that he lurches towards so many times, but he’s come damn close.

Stan stopped calling his brother a long, long time ago, after the millionth time his twin picked up and Stan couldn’t continue through the fear and the choking sensation in his throat.

_Now look who’s calling?_

It’s three in the morning, and Stanley ponders what Ford would even want with his existence now. Stan is practically worthless anyways. Right? None of his ventures have amounted to anything compared to what his brother has probably done with his life.

He smooths the postcard between his fingers and tries to feel something towards it. _Anything_. All he can muster is some awful mixture of longing and loneliness that should have just silently stayed put inside his head. Sighing, he tries to read over the words for the thousandth time in the pale light reflected from the flickering street lamp. He can’t make anything out through the darkness of the curtains, but that’s okay. He’s memorized it by now, anyways.

 

“PLEASE COME!”

 

The script is shaky, but distinctively Stanford’s. His brother always had neat, loopy handwriting, but somehow this is a little different. This is hasty. This, for some reason, seems desperate in the way it’s scrawled across the card haphazardly. Stan almost scoffs at how well he can still read his twin from just a single sample of his damn _writing_ . He can practically see him, chewing on the end of his pen in that nervous way he always did and jotting down a few simple words. He pictures the scribbles in his mind and frowns against the darkness. There’s a creeping sense of urgency in that one small phrase and it’s almost tangible enough to make Stan uneasy. Could his twin really be _desperate_ for him? After all these years?

Maybe Ford is in some sort of trouble.

Maybe Stan is just overthinking things, as usual.

He tries his best to fall asleep, but peace evades him all night. Instead, he gets flashes of memories warped with something darker. Stanford and him, burying their toes in the warm sand of the beach. Way back in New Jersey. They giggle as the waves brush against their sunburnt ankles with alabaster foam, carrying away the tiny grains. The steadily departing sunlight bathes Stan’s face as he watches the two children as if he is a part of the backdrop of dunes and summer grass. His brother bends down to his toes and hides one finger on each hand beneath the shore. _So I’ll look normal_ . Young Stan kicks the sand off and smiles brightly as the sky casts a reddish glow upon the sea. _You don’t have to._

Stan grins and watches the two of them tumble about along the coast. This is good, this is better than the dreams about trunks and alleyways, better than the rainwater in his shoes as he tastes copper and feels the snap of a fist across his face. Those nightmares were clouded, though, and these seem much too vividly colored, the sand too rough beneath his feet, but he chalks it up to an overactive mind falling back on the first good sleep he’s had in ages. It’s funny, some back part of his head warns, that this night of all nights would be the time for him to sleep well. After all, didn’t his brother just sent him something awfully…

Awfully...

What was it again?

He relaxes in the enveloping heat of the sand, and it bathes him like warmth from a fire even though something behind his eyelids is crackling blue. Stan feels as though he’s missing something important but that little voice in his head is gone and he can’t for the life of him remember what it was babbling about. But as the shadows of the twins begin to fade to purple with the amber glow of afternoon, he realizes how swiftly the sun is setting. A thunderclap booms above him and he jumps. His eyes flash to the sky where tumultuous clouds have begun rolling in almost as vehemently as the tide. Everything drops to gray under the grizzled atmosphere.

“Let’s go swimming, Stanley,” says a small voice in front of him. Stan looks back at the ocean as a few frigid raindrops land like tears on his cheeks.

Little Stanford is staring straight at him, and a chill runs up Stan’s spine. His younger self is nowhere to be seen as the summer breeze picks up and cools down instantaneously, spraying cold wetness in his eyes. He blinks furiously, raising a hand to shield his face, but the small Ford makes no motion. He just keeps peering at him with that eerily flat gaze, arms hanging loosely by his sides.

“Swimming,” Ford repeats, but it doesn't sound anything like what it's supposed to. His voice is garbled and high-pitched with an audible echo, like he's standing in an empty room and not against thrashing waves. It's cold and much too strong, much too sinister for the tiny boy in glasses whose hands are dripping with seawater and runny sand over his soaked shirt.

Stan recoils, falling back into the sand, but it just turns to liquid in his palms. “Let’s go swimming, Stanley.” Stanford grins, and the tidal wave crushes him.

Murky water dribbles through the dream until the beach is washed away under icy gloom. There is laughter that makes Stan’s skin crawl and he whirls around as best he can, searching frantically for whatever lurks behind the waves. Every movement he makes is slurred and sluggish. This, somehow, matches the speed of the grayish light refracting against the supine crests atop the water’s surface. Someone, or some _thing_ , is screaming through the floating specks of green. A silhouette that comes slowly into view is reaching out to him, dark and lifeless and drifting. The hair on the back of Stan’s neck stands up even as he takes a gulp of the water, and then he’s choking on dark aegean blue and crying out and he can’t _breathe_ \--

Stan wakes up groggy with a half-formed memory of a lake and an ache in his neck. He’s shivering in the pale light atop the sheets, but somehow he managed to sweat through everything he’s wearing until it’s practically dripping. _Let’s go swimming, Stanley!_ The postcard watches him unnervingly in anticipation from where it rests atop the dusty mattress. He begrudgingly pinches his nose as he picks it up again. He’d thought a good night’s sleep would help clear his head and make the choice a little easier, but, well. When has his life ever come close to easy? The exhaustion dulling his body is just as palpable as before, and he now has the strangest taste of mud under his tongue. Plus an aggravating voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Ford. That, too.

 _Come on, Stanley. Think,_ the voice chides in exasperation, and Moses, it sounds like his brother is right there, sitting cross-legged on the bed with a book open in his lap. _Make up your mind_ , Ford urges as he adjusts his glasses, but no. It’s not Ford. Ford is across the country, doing who knows what with his big brain and bad habits.

Stan exhales slowly and inspects the postcard in the dim light until his eyes burn. The sick feeling in his stomach is partly due to the fact that he hasn’t eaten a decent meal in about a week and partly apprehension. The more he thinks about it, the more plausible it seems that Ford would have gotten himself into some kind of mess. It could be science or legal shit or anything else, but it probably wouldn't surprise Stan given what he's seen both in his own life and his life, ages ago, with his brother.

As a teenager, Stan constantly had to remind and coax his twin to do the simplest of things when it came to taking care of himself. Ford wouldn’t eat or sleep or do practically anything besides study when they were in high school. The shadows under his eyes became full-on bags, and Stan would often find him passed out in his bunk with a textbook over his chest right before big tests. All the parents and teachers kept telling them that it was time they started getting serious about their futures, but Stanford Pines had always been focused. He’d always been serious. Although, a younger Stanley never thought it was about the right things.

“You’ve gotta eat something to keep that huge brain o’ yours running, Poindexter,” Stan would say, forever reasonable.

“In a minute, Stanley,” Ford would reply, forever insouciant.

He looks the card over, front and back, and fiddles with an edge until the paper turns to shreds. Stan frowns at the ink stains and the writing and that weird red stuff on the back. He picks at it absentmindedly while tossing the words around in his head another time. It crumbles to a fine dust on his fingers and leaves behind faded marks, almost resembling blood.

It’s probably nothing. Probably just residue from an experiment or something.

Or something.

There goes that fucking protectiveness again, tugging his organs around like puppets on strings until he’s sick. It never fails to amaze him how worried he can get over someone who hasn’t cared about him since the minute Stan left home. Well, ‘left’ was a generous term for it.

That little version of Ford has gone eerily quiet in the back of his mind. Stan looks for it, wistful and somehow struggling to remember what his brother’s voice really sounds like without the help of his subconscious. Everything is dark shadows and nightmares, though, and he’s alone. Alone in the swirling paleness of the fog. It arcs and twists in phantasmical loops, translucent and deep like water, sinking into the pit of his stomach in the form of something that feels an awful lot like dread. Something, something, _something--why_ won’t that terrifying word just leave him alone?

Loyalty to his family is something he has never really gotten over. Sure, it’s been a few weeks since he called Ma. A few more since his last attempt to contact his twin. He doesn’t even know how long it’s been since he and Shermie talked. Despite all that, it’s a force that drives him, and he knows deep down that he would do anything for any of the Pines family members. Well, maybe not for his father, but he has damn good reasoning for that. Ford never got to that level of betrayal as their dad, though, and in a way Stan is grateful for it. For the fact that as much as he’s tried to resent his brother, Stan really just can’t find the blame to place on his twin whilst sifting and plunging through piles of his own shameful failures.

He knows that what happened with Ford’s project was an accident, even though he had definitely been afraid of the consequences of Ford leaving him behind for some fancy college. He wonders if that changes anything anymore, or if Ford has already forgiven him. Or if he’s just still trying to forget. Like Stan.

Family loyalty is what makes the uneasiness in his gut swim with fear, entangling until he can’t tell which is which. Ford is asking him to come, to come _see him_ , and Stan is sitting here holding a cry for help still stained by his twin’s _bloody_ fucking _fingerprints_.

 _Something_ must have happened to Ford to make him call out so urgently to the last person he’d probably want to see on the face of the planet, Stan decides. Or, rather, he _knows_ when the fog abruptly snaps away and he can see himself clearly. Himself, and Ford; a really young Ford. A Ford still missing some of his teeth and blatantly oblivious to the future his brother, the one playing by his side in the sand, will destroy. The water curls up around their legs as they rest by the ocean, and Stan shudders. One of the walls of young Ford’s sand castle crumbles at his feet. Young Stan patches it up with a wide smile and wet, band-aid-covered hands. The setting sun catches the edge of Ford’s glasses and Stan is blinded by brilliant yellow.

When he opens his eyes to the gray bleakness of his room, he startles. Now Ford is there with him, like, _really_ there, or at least it looks like he’s perched on the edge of Stan’s bed.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Stan says to the totally unreal figure sitting with him. Ford looks older than the last time he saw him, and more like the face Stan keeps trying to avoid in the mirror. His hair is still fluffier, though, and short, although those sideburns could make up for the length of Stan’s mullet any day.

“For once your sense of judgement pulls through,” Ford says dryly, and Stan wants to cry at the sound of his voice.

“Unless I’m having a psychic vision or somethin’, which would be great business for Ma, you’re definitely not really here,” Stan states, lamely. Then he pauses. “You ain’t a ghost or anything, right?” he says and cracks a wavering smile, but his words fall flat like the pale yellow lighting across the floorboards.

Call him superstitious, but after the dream he just had, he wouldn’t put it past him. Ford could be--no. No, no, _no_. He _just_ got a postcard from his brother. Ford needs a little help, that’s all. A voice chastising him in his head reminds him, _it_ _urgently told you to come. With a ‘please’. Does that sound like a normal Ford, after what you did to him?_ But it's _Ford_ , he couldn't be--?

He wonders if it’s a sign that the first objection to his thought wasn’t just that “ghosts aren’t real.”

Ford sighs in exasperation, giving him a withered look. Stan notes the purple smudges under his eyes and the twitchiness of his mouth. He holds a nameless book carefully in his lap, partially covered by twelve fingers. The cover is red, Stan thinks; he never thought Ford had much of an affinity for red, at least in their youth. That was always Stan’s color. “Of course I’m not really here. I’m there,” his brother says patronizingly, pointing at the postcard. “Or,” he adds with a thoughtful expression, “at least I _should_ still be. For your sake, I hope so.” Either he ignores the part about ghosts, or, like Stan, he isn’t really sure, either.

“What do you mean?” Stan breathes, but he is unable to say any more. He squints as the light bathing the floor flares brighter and brighter, and everything starts going fuzzy under the sickly lemon-gray.

“Please come,” Ford whispers, and there’s a brief moment where Stan can still see his face beneath the burning gleam. His eyes are overcast and faded and he’s smiling in that twisted, pained way like when he’s going to cry but Stan hasn’t seen his brother cry in years, not since the night that changed everything, and _what’s going on_?

Stan awakes from his trance with a jolt, his heart practically shooting out of his ribcage. He sits there on the otherwise empty bed gasping and clutching at his chest for a few minutes while the silence settles around him. “I must really be out of it,” he says, softly, to the empty space in which Ford had sat. His stomach grumbles painfully in agreement and he winces. “Ugh. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted that sandwich yesterday. Maybe I’m having green-meat-induced hallucinations.” Grimacing against the ache in his temples, he drops his head into his hands and lets out a low, long breath until the pounding sensation in his chest stops. “Maybe I’m just going crazy,” he sighs, examining the faded checkered pattern of the thin bedcovers. He rubs the fabric anxiously between two fingers before pausing and raising his head.

“What am I doing?” he asks the unfortunately Ford-less space in vexation, and it just stares back at him mournfully. _Nothing you should be_ , says that annoyingly welcome voice in the back of his brain, and he exhales in resolution.

“What _can_ I do,” he says, weakly, and it’s not as much a question as it is a memory of defeat.

 _Please come, please come_ , Ford--or the ghost of Ford, Stan isn’t really sure what he’ll find in Oregon anymore--whispers to him from every knot in the wood of the walls.

Before he knows it, he’s snatching his coat from the edge of the bed and retrieving the postcard from where it fell from his slack hands. “I’ll always come for you, nerd,” he says quietly, throwing open the door to the somber New Mexico sky. Double checking the address on the card, he grabs his bag and steels himself against the bitter winter wind he knows will come.

 

***

 

He realizes it’s lucky as hell that he chose to head to Oregon so quickly as soon as he sees Ford’s face, white as a sheet, and the way he throws open the door with wild eyes.

Everything that comes after is...well. Not so lucky for either of them.

 

 

( _I_ _may have sent him some funny little dreams to get him here a little faster,_ Bill had said, as Ford bit his nails to the quick. It must have been several days since he mailed the postcard, but Ford had barely been upstairs since then, so. It was a little hard for him to tell time.

 

 _It’s hilarious. You two still have a connection. Is that a twin thing? It was so easy to find him,_ he laughed, as the blood dripped from Ford’s arms and teeth and hair and _everywhere_.

 

 _You should be grateful._ Ford’s hands were slippery as he picked the shards of glass out of his red knuckles. He missed a few times, likely due to the partial blindness he'd awoken with after passing out--again--on the bathroom floor. One of his eyes was a little bloodier than normal, and its lid was aching with being held open for...however long Bill had taken, this time. Chunks of his life kept going, but that was okay. And the red running from his nose was okay. And the pieces of glass went deeper with the tremors of his fingers, and it was okay, it was okay. The blood ran faster. He didn’t mind. _If you simply won't stop trying to set me back, I might as well help you two out. It'll all end up in my favor, anyway._ And that it did, as Ford found out. That it did.)

 

***

It’s been two weeks since Ford’s...departure, and Stan finds it funny how one twin returned from exile only to have the other immediately be sucked away like some kind of sick joke.

He’s definitely going to have to head into town, as unappealing as that may seem, to get some groceries pretty soon. Once he finally felt less like shit after the first week and a half of barely eating, hardly sleeping, and dreamless wandering through the bleak and empty halls of Stanford Pines’ house like some forgotten ghost, he realized truly how bare Ford’s kitchen cabinets were. His brother definitely had looked like he hadn’t eaten proper meals of any kind in weeks--hadn’t done anything, seen anyone, been anywhere-- and Stan could judge why by the state of his pantry. For now, Stan slowly warms a can of old beans in grim silence as the snow falls like an ageless cocoon outside. It sets him on edge and reminds him of the first day he came here.

The day he finally came, even when it was still too late and prone to his own endless mistakes.

Stan eats in the dead lull of his brother’s house with only the soft sound of the flakes outside the window keeping him company. The quietude of it all is murder to his senses and he aches to hear the whir of that portal in the same way he fears it. He wouldn’t mind plunging in himself, and he definitely wouldn’t mind hauling Ford out of the blue void if either situation meant he could somehow be of use to his brother.

_If I’d taken the damn journal…_

No. _You’d never have seen him again. Who knows what he would’ve done when you finally left. He looked like he was close to…_ Stan swallows uneasily and slams the door on those thoughts and memories as quickly as he can. He sets the dirty dishes in the sink with a clinking noise, resolving to finish that job later. Maybe. If he feels up to it. If he’s not busy trying to make sense of all of Ford’s scientific documents and blueprints for something that looks disturbingly like a doomsday device.

Stan drags a heavy hand over his face and shuffles through the numbing cold of the house-- _Ford’s_ house--until he reaches what he imagines is his brother’s bedroom. The blue fluff of the outrageously plush rug, which is so utterly _Ford_ in some way that it makes Stan’s chest quake, catches on his socked feet like fluffy tentacles as he makes his way towards the window. He avoids the massive stacks of paper piled around the room, vowing to handle those, too, at a later time. A time when he is farther away from teetering into that black hole he’s been carefully skirting around since he was seventeen. As he peers through the cloudy redness of the glass, he tugs his threadbare jacket even tighter around himself and remembers what he came for.

Stan gingerly picks up the journal, emblazoned with a tarnished six-fingered hand and the number one on its faded cover, and along with it, the postcard. The last thing Ford ever wrote to him. The last thing he ever will write to him, unless he finds a way to fix this.

 

 

(Ford had curled his fingers around the pen, hand shaking. “Stanley will come,” he told himself, told the demon in the back of his head where no one but the all-knowing beast could see.

 

He had fleshed out another postcard with the taste of salt on his tongue and an unintelligible muttering in his ear like radio static. His fingers had been sticky against the paper, leaving little red reminders behind on the folded edges. There was no time for correction.

 

Stanley would come. He knew it, knew that whichever card he sent would bring his brother to the doorway of a man stained with blood and a million scattered dreams. Stanford knew a lot of things, after all.

 

He just wasn't quite sure if he'd be there to greet Stan at the front steps.)

 

                                    ***

The matching postcard, its gruesome twin, makes its way to Stan eventually.

It falls out of a stack of papers covered up to the very edges in equations that make Stan’s head swim just by looking at them. He’s hauling them from one corner of Ford’s lab to the control panel area, where he’s set up an organized (sort of) collection of piles. Portal Stuff goes in one spot, Maybe Portal Stuff But Who Knows goes in another, and Stan’s still trying to figure out what the rest of the scientific documents really are. Some appear to be drawings of machines, and a lot of those hold calculations in someone else’s handwriting.

He drops the papers to the floor with a huff, sneezing as a small cloud of dust and what looks like portal debris poof up as they make contact with the ground. It’s when he’s bending down to start deciphering some of Ford’s insanely complicated work that he sees where the postcard has slid to the other end of the room.

 

_This is goodbye, Stan._

 

He’s hit with surprise, which is slowly overtaken by confusion, which escalates into alarm coursing like venom through his blood. It's the most he's felt in days, and, like he’s been crushed beneath an icy wave, he suddenly is rendered shockingly awake.

The postcard appears identical to the one sitting upstairs, the one kept in a secret box in Stan’s room. Hastily he scales the stairs, card in his hand while the other hovers by his side, white-knuckled. When he puts the two cards side-by-side, sees the continuation of ink splatters and similarity of the messy writing and the distinctive red fingerprints on the back, he wants to shout at something because he doesn’t _understand_.

This was buried, it was out of sight for years, and Stan can’t make sense of it.

He's been staring at it for too long by the next time he focuses on where he is-- _in the kitchen? In Ford’s kitchen where he sat and thought and dreamed and hoped and_ \-- and the sun is peeking through one of the windows as he sits at the table with both hands in his hair. It's a Saturday, six in the morning on an early summer day, and there'll be tourists coming to look at all his fake attractions soon. _Get your ass up and deal with this later. You have work to do._

He runs through the motions until he wears himself out, and he does it again. And again. And again.

Wake up. Open the Shack. Work. Work. Work. Close the Shack. Go downstairs. _Find your brother._ Sleep, if that's even possible. Wake up. Again. And again. And again.

 

And again.

 

Every day it's the same, but now his routine has been unceremoniously overthrown for some reason by this postcard, this _note_ , and he can't wrap his head around it. He's made up a lot of possible conclusions, sure, and it probably is really simple, but his brain is so addled by lack of rest and pots of extra-strong coffee--plus, maybe the occasional supplement from Ford’s massive stash of various drinks--that nothing is easy nowadays.

It's a goodbye, that's what it is. He just doesn't know what kind, and that's probably the worst part about it. Not the words, really, but the tone.

Is it anger? Was Ford just going to send him a reminder that their relationship as two parts of a whole was over forever? Maybe he’d figured out about the silent calls. Maybe Ma had told him something.

 

Something, something, something.

 

Is it sadness? Did Ford suspect that his portal might suck him in, even without his brother’s assistance? Was he worried about something coming out of it? This one makes Stan shudder, and he’s wary of the portal every time he walks up to it and pulls its lever. Even though it never turns on, never works, because _nothing_ works. Did Ford think that his trouble was too big for even his sibling to handle?

Is it resignation? Loss of hope?

That might be the worst possibility.

Is there even a tone, or was Ford too far gone back then to even express himself in any way other than tired frustration? Stan knows that if he pushes all selfish reasons aside, he really does need to get his twin back just for the sheer fact that he looked like he was half a day away from going nuts before he got pulled in through that portal. He appeared to be on the edge of a precipice that surely would only lead to the gates of an institution or the bottom of a cliff.

Ford would want Stan to bring him home, right?

 

Right?

 

Stan closes up the Shack as the last crowd leaves and the fir trees glow with evening pink, a strange sense of disturbance in the back if his mind. Then he’s back inside with the crash of the heavy door behind him, and the blue shadow cast by the fading sun surrounds him like the ocean.

 

_No, this is not fucking goodbye, Ford._

 

***

He gets his brother back from Bill, but something is unmistakably wrong. Stan just can’t figure out what that _something_ is. The feeling of anxiety waiting in the shadows lingers persistently after he and Ford start the next chapter of their lives on the Stan O’ War II. They begin only after tedious weeks of tension, finally coming to the agreement that Stan’s memories are mostly (hopefully) intact. They're just a little prone to fading away for bits of time. Much like Ford, who keeps washing in and out of alertness as the days on their boat go by.

Stan recognizes the hazy look on his brother’s face now, and he can tell that it's mostly from that damn insomnia, but sometimes he catches the faintest whiff of alcohol on Ford’s sweaters and he wonders.

They’re somewhere near the end of their first month at sea. It's not the light that wakes him as much as it is the sound of something solidly colliding with another hard surface over and over. _Thump._ A pause. _Thump_. “Ford,” he hisses, but when he scrambles for his glasses and peeks over the edge of the top bunk, it is apparent from the cold and flattened sheets that his twin left ages ago. If he was even there at all. “Ford,” he tries again to the gray room, until the banging noise echoes through the vessel again.

Stan creeps from the edge of the bed to the main area of the cabin, where a ghostly yellow light flickers across the walls and furniture. There's a lump in his throat that's gradually getting tougher to swallow against as he inches around the doorway of their shared bedroom. The pale yellow glows eerily on the insides of his glasses, and he curls his hands into tight fists against his sides until he feels his knuckles pop.

The color makes his stomach churn, and he’s hit with a recollection of _burning_ and _blue_ and someone screaming inside his head. A crumbling world with crumbling dreams. A man with tears on his cheeks as he says that _you’re a hero_ and _you’ll never remember,_ and the world spins as Stan looks at them all gathered there because there’s something he’s missing. There’s a code, a puzzle of some sort, but in hindsight he knows that Ford’s always been the smarter one out of the two of them so he just drifts for a while. Drifts in the endless blankness of the deep green.

He shakes it off and keeps going, because Stanford is somewhere out there with the yellow light.

The Stan O’ War II rocks back and forth beneath his feet, and Stan balances himself against a wall as gales of wind shriek above the boat. As far as he can remember (which is limited these days, even though the lapses have gotten fewer and farther between) they weren’t expecting a storm. Maybe his brother got up to check for problems? He tries unsuccessfully to blink away the sleep that makes the edges of his vision cloudy. There’s a potent smell in the air and he wrinkles his nose, but for some reason he can’t tell what it is through the bleariness of being woken up at three in the morning. The glow persists, tauntingly, and he wonders if he’s imagining it when the wind almost whispers to him through the floorboards.

 

_Where’s old Six-fingers, huh? He’s gone and left again, Mister Mystery..._

 

When he finally musters the courage to look at the source of the light from the edge of the doorframe, he lets out a shuddering breath. It's only a lamp casting that sinister light, the flame dipping in and out beside what seems to be Ford’s newest set of maps pinned under a half-full glass. Ford himself doesn’t appear to be present, though. One of the kitchen chairs is pulled out at an angle, almost touching the cabinets and sparkling with something reflective and shiny. Papers are sticking strangely to the walls, setting off a small alarm somewhere in the back of Stan’s exhausted mind. A few have blown across the floor of the kitchen. There’s a puddle on the floor that Stan swears wasn’t there before he went to bed, but all he can do for a moment is blink sluggishly in the light.

 

Wait.

 

Stan’s alert in an instant because that glass isn't the only one sitting there with the papers, and the gleaming on the chair is from what could be a shattered bottle or two ( _or three or four_ ), and the loud noise he'd heard was the sound of the cabin door being slammed against the exterior siding with the blustering ocean wind. No wonder there’s a pool of rainwater forming in their kitchen; the papers are being pressed against the wall with the sheer force of the gusts. He's pushing past the table and the acrid odor of its contents in a second, and he's out on the slippery deck with a panic in two.

“Ford,” Stan shouts, and his voice is lost to the howling of the wind as needles of rain pierce his skin. He staggers, blindly, out into the open, looking wildly for his brother. The water is crashing down in white slabs to the point where he can’t see much besides the hazy outline of the railing beside him.

 _You didn't hear a splash,_ one side of his head is reasoning as he rushes to the edge of the ship, while the other is screaming _you wouldn't be able to hear it over this racket, dumbass._ There's nothing but the roiling black of the sea below him as he leans over the rail, and he doesn't know whether to feel sick or relieved in the opaque curtain of the rain. For a moment he’s suddenly back in that dream, the one that came decades ago bringing thrashing gray waves and the sickly yellow of the sun, and it hits him with a sensation of suddenly making _so much sense_ that this isn’t the first time the water has threatened his brother.

He's turning around before he can register the movement, searching for any figure by the boat’s wheel. There is none. As he turns to grab onto a loose rope being thrashed about by the wind, he suddenly sees him through a gap in the stinging sheets on the other side of the boat, and _oh Moses he's really close to the edge, get over there, get over there_ now.

“Ford,” he yells again, but the storm absorbs his voice like it’s nothing. Like _they_ are nothing, just tiny specks of dust in the eye of something massive and very, very angry. Like Ford’s foot resting on the bottom rung of the railing and his ivory knuckles clutching the banister are nothing. Stan staggers towards his brother as the boat lurches to and fro in the tempestuous waves. Ford’s back is to him, but even through the haze Stan can see the soaked turtleneck clinging to his body, covered in swirling blue frost patterns as he sways back and forth, back and forth like the tide.

“You need to come inside, Poindexter. Please,” he calls over the wind, stomach tied in knots.

Ford is silent, or maybe his reply is drowned out by the sloshing of the vessel. Either way, Stan makes it close enough to note how Ford’s clenched hands are sliding up and down the rail. His hair is plastered to his scalp. He probably smells like cedar and rosemary and coffee somewhere beneath the layers upon layers of alcohol. His skin probably feels cold as death.

_Shit shitshit you knew this was coming, you saw the signs, dammit Stanley, he's finally going to--_

He stops and calms his breaths, because the future of this is based on choices, and the better decision maker of the two may be shitfaced beyond belief but nothing can stop Stan Pines from getting to his brother. Not thirty years, not a dream demon, not the slick surface of their shared vessel.

“I’m not going to kill myself.” Ford says it in a slurred voice that’s thick enough to send fearful chills down Stan’s neck, and Stan wants to punch him, to take him into the water himself because Ford isn't supposed to be the lying one. Stan's got a slippery hand clamped over his mouth and his brother’s goddamn emotionless tone is enough to make him want to throw up. He’s reaching out for the man on the edge but Ford still won’t turn around, still won’t do _anything_ but stare at the nothingness and breathe with shaking shoulders.

“Okay, Ford, okay, take it easy,” Stan manages through painfully clenched teeth and a cracking voice because, well, what else can he say? _I know you’re a fucking liar and this is anything but okay and do you know how much this hurts me how it would hurt me how it will hurt me--_

Ford laughs bitterly, then, and Stan’s molars grind together. _“_ Heh. Y-you know, in other--” He sways against the railing, pitching forward enough to make Stan’s heart leap. “In other dimensions, I already have,” he says flatly like Stan never even spoke, turning to peer at him over his shoulder, dark-eyed.

A choked noise comes from somewhere inside Stan without his permission because his twin looks so empty and _gone_ , nothing like what he was at seventeen with so many dreams before him, and Ford’s shifting his gaze back towards the ocean but he doesn’t get too far because Stan lunges towards him and grips him by his soaked collar. He’s expecting a fight but doesn’t get one, as Ford slumps unceremoniously in his arms like the railing was the only thing keeping him from melting away with the rain.

“Shit--” Stan winces, his feet sliding on the slick deck as he clutches his shuddering twin closer to him. His eyes are half-lidded, and the odor of liquor is so strong around him that Stan feels that same queasy feeling threatening to roll in his stomach again. “I’ve gotcha. I’m here, Poindexter. Let’s get you inside.” He slings one of Ford’s limp arms around his shoulder and practically drags him through the swinging door to the damp warmth of indoors.

“Bill,” Ford breathes against Stan’s collarbone.

“He’s gone, Ford. We killed him,” Stan says, almost fearfully. Angrily, because when under his protection did Ford get like this?

 

 _You didn’t notice it before?_ cackles something in the back of his head so faintly that he barely catches it. _I’ve missed seeing Six-fingers in this state. It started aaaaages ago._

 

“N-no,” Ford swallows, eyelashes wet and dark against his skin.“He’s never gone,” he mumbles, “not really. Not ever.” His exhalation is warm and light on Stan’s neck, and Stan, pulse spiking, guides him onto the bottom bunk after helping him into some dry clothes. He only gets changed himself after Ford has slumped onto one side, an arm clutched against his middle and a quilt over his shaking body. Like hell Stan is going to bed while his brother is in this state. It takes the wind right out of him, almost, when he realizes that Ford’s usually the one bringing _him_ to level-headedness. Grounding _him_ . The sweat-slicked hand clutched in his own is a mistake, because it’s usually tight around his shoulder as his twin tells him that his name is Stanford, _yours is Stanley Pines, I’m your twin brother and I can be an ass most of the time but you love me anyways._

“It’s okay, Stan. Bill isn’t here anymore,” Stanford would say, softly, as Stan quaked in his arms.

“No, I-I saw him, he was gonna kill you, the kids--”

“We got him first,” Ford always reminds him with a small smile.

Stan would pause, then nod reluctantly. “What if we...what if we didn’t? What if he’s still…” Tapping the side of his head, staring at Ford, always staring at Ford.

His brother’s mouth would draw into a thin-pressed line. “He’s gone, Stan. Don’t worry,” he’d say, but Stan could see the way he rubbed his wrists, a lingering look of fear still present in his tense shoulders.

Ford wakes up with a hangover the size of Lake Gravity Falls and a shitty recollection of anything involving the shattered glass Stan had to clean up in the morning or the tossing and turning and aching of the restless night. He does, however, seem to remember with sober clarity the way Stan shouts until his voice goes hoarse over why the hell Ford would get himself into that situation in the first place. And why his subconscious decided to make him almost fling himself into the ocean in a state of suicidal resignation.

 

That, too.

 

Stan knows he remembers because Ford is quieter than usual around him for days after. Nervous, slightly, because Stan’s eyes had been puffy and bloodshot when he’d told him that this, well. This, a small boat with a set of twins and some fishing line, was all he’d ever wanted when he’d lost Ford to that portal, and the bottom of a bottle was the same circular shape that would suck Ford away from him. For good, this time. Shaky, because Stan pointedly threw the entire contents of the alcohol cabinet overboard while Ford stood by, still and blank-faced in the twilight. He knows it’s not good for him, even if he only thinks he has a mild affinity for the stuff. _Just to help me sleep on the bad nights, Stanley,_ he’d reasoned, although those seemed to be a constant, now.  Even though Stan told him outright that _it’s addiction, Ford. You’re...I can’t...I can’t stand by and watch you destroy yourself._ Stan isn't stupid, contrary to popular belief, and he's not oblivious, either. He's taken some liberties to ignore and forget in the past, but, well. All he does nowadays is try not to forget anything, not after the almost-apocalypse, and Ford’s condition is not something easily ignored.

Ford is understanding, and Stanley is patient. Ford is trembling with sleep deprivation and withdrawal, and Stanley is worried with new lines in his face and nights spent just trying to get his twin to close his eyes. Ford says he’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine and he needs to help Stanley keep remembering because Stanley’s all that matters now, but _that’s not true_.

Eventually, they come to a point where Stan lets Ford go out on deck unaccompanied for more than a minute, and Ford’s hands don’t shake like leaves inside his coat. Eventually, they get somewhere, and Stan knows that it's time one morning when he wakes up from another whispering voice telling him about green depths and postcards, red stains and the dazed look of someone who'd been hiding for a very, very long time. He pulls out the memory from a long-locked box he'd almost torched once or twice, and he bares it forth to Stanford like a scar. That's what it is, isn't it? What it could have been? It could have left a wound so deep as to potentially be fatal, but instead it left a burn. A burn in the shape of a six-fingered hand and a possibility for something else.

Something much less forgiving.

Ford is understanding, but not trembling, when he takes Stan’s questions in stride. When he forces out Bill’s name and tells the tiny interior of their boat about the world inside his head. The world that Bill manipulated those thirty years ago.

“I’ve missed you so, so much,” Stan says into the folds of Ford’s sweater, and he means it.

“I’ve missed you too,” Ford replies, and Stan knows he’s steadfast for the first time in ages. The ocean murmurs all around them and their boat like a ghost, but Ford isn’t sinking this time.

 _Something_. It’s a concept much deeper than a single word, two syllables, and Stan doesn't really need elaboration by the universe because he thinks he gets it now. He's been chasing _something_ all his life, of course, and it seems like Ford has too.

But, there’s no _something_ anymore. It’s been defined for him clearly. _Something_ is now, _something_ is here, even if it’s holding tightly to his brother’s hand as he swears and cries and goes pale from nightmare after nightmare in the dark. It's also ocean breezes and coffee in the afternoons and fishing with his brother as the sun peeks with golden light above the vastness of the sea. There's no mountains of cash or tropical islands covered in babes, but Stan’s come to the peaceful conclusion that a purely simple life with Ford is all he's ever really wanted. His brother hasn’t ever seemed to really be interested in those other things, anyways.

Ford seems to be finally breaking the surface of the hazy black water he’s been trapped under for so many decades, and maybe Stan is, too. Maybe he's finally escaping the blue beach dreams where Ford’s eyes go yellow and the clouds turn black, and he’s waking up to silver skies with a hint of cocoa and someone smiling beside him. That disgusting triangle is still there, and sometimes Stan’s the one waking up with yellow pressed to the insides of his eyelids and sweat streaming down his neck, but it’s okay because Ford is there to pull him towards the light. _Something_ is just Ford and Stan, Stan and Ford. Up against the world. Together.

  
It has been, all along, and it always will be.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm very sorry about all this. I don't mean to hurt the Pines twins THAT much... Thank you for reading!


End file.
